“David McCormick…is trying to reinvent himself as a Trump stalwart”
PENNSYLVANIA – New reporting from the New York Times highlights Connecticut hedge fund executive David McCormick’s attempts to suck up to Donald Trump while trying to distract from his damaging record on China and trade.
The New York Times describes McCormick’s recent employer Bridgewater as:
…a world away from Pennsylvania cities like Scranton, McKeesport and Aliquippa, which have been hit hard by the kinds of shifts in global trade that Bridgewater’s traders and analysts seek to monetize each day.
Click here for the full article and see below for the highlights:
- Like Republican candidates across the country, McCormick has been studiously trying to cast himself as a Trump-style contender, hoping that he can win over enough of the former president’s supporters to win the nomination in a crowded primary.
- But this MAGA makeover hasn’t been easy. McCormick says he’s a fan of Donald Trump. But he also has a record of breaking with the former president, and of holding positions at odds with the base of the Republican Party.
- In 2016, during a speech at the West Point Society of New York, he criticized the “impulse among some candidates to close our doors and leave the world to fend for itself.” In 2017, he described Trump aides as having “no sense of how the world works.”
- In a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post, he backed Amy McGrath, a Democrat who would later challenge Senator Mitch McConnell, in her race against Representative Andy Barr, Republican of Kentucky.
- More recently, McCormick called the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol “horrific” and “a dark chapter in American history.”
- Past comments on the U.S.-China relationship are now being exhumed by reporters and weaponized by his opponents.
- “When China succeeds, America succeeds,” McCormick wrote in a 2007 paper published in an economic journal. “The United States must also avoid the siren song of protectionism.”
- The campaign of Mehmet Oz, one of his Senate primary rivals, better known as Dr. Oz, has aired an ad accusing him of “selling us out” as a Wall Street executive and criticizing his China ties;
Pennsylvania Democrats put up a website, blessedbyChina.com, with a selectively clipped highlight reel of his comments over the years.